The exposition that follows, for simplicity of explanation, illustrates the invention according to a particular embodiment, which is, an operation abnormality detector of electronic modules, utilized in the mouthpieces of card readers banking terminals, without being restricted by this motive to only this embodiment, being possible to be utilized in money, checkbook, banking deposit envelopes retrieval mouthpiece, and in any other place where it will be utilized an electronic module of a self-serving machine.
Banking machines of the self-serving terminals type are known to a person skilled in the art where the user can, without the aid of a banking employee, perform banking transactions such as: draft money, deposit values, get statement of his/her account, make transfers between accounts, etc.
Except for few operations, for example, banking deposit transactions, the remaining ones require the user to utilize a magnetic card and a password to perform them.
In order to utilize a self-serving terminal the user must insert the magnetic card in a notch of a mouthpiece or card reader device that, after reading it requests some data from the user and card in order to allow the realization of the banking transactions.
Upon inserting the card in said mouthpiece, the information comprised in its magnetic tape is read. After the reading completion the user removes the card.
Because the machines are often arranged in a non-guarded locale the occurrence of fraud is common.
A common type of fraud that is known is the changing of the card reader module or the installation of a false mouthpiece over the original that, being of alike appearance to the original, mislead the user that does not realizes it as being a false mouthpiece. The magnetic reader of the false mouthpiece reads and storages the card data, while a camera installed at the terminal cabin registers the images of the user typing his/hers password, or any other data required by the machine. With these data in hand, the defrauder clones the users' cards and start performing w4Qdrawals and transfers from their accounts.
In order to avoid this type of fraud, keyboard protectors have been utilized that make difficult or even preclude the data typed by the user from being captured by any camera.
It occurs that to bypass this measure, defrauders install keyboards superposed to the machine keyboard. So, when typing the password, it is registered by the defrauding keyboard.
In order to avoid this to occur and to preclude the theft of information contained in the user card, the present invention presents an operation abnormality detector of the card reader, which in the occurrence of a substitution of the original or superposing of a false mouthpiece, informs the alarm central and, for example, deactivates the display, not allowing the use of the terminal by any user.
In this way the present detector avoids the reading and registering of data from the card by third parties, precluding accordingly the cloning of the magnetic cards.